After recording three episodes of our new podcast Coulda Been Rad, it was my job to figure out how to get these episodes up and onto iTunes. Seems simple enough; we’d already done over 60 episodes of our Old Town New World podcast at that point, no problem. I searched, headscratched, compared my options and was continually mystified with what to do. I wanted the simplest, closest to free solution there was. Old Town New World has a dedicated WordPress site that uses BluBerry, and that is an amazing option if you’ve got the money to host your site, buy your theme, understand how to set up the site and purchase/install BluBerry. It’s too complicated and expensive for my personal use.
Here are the five steps that worked for me. There are so many other (potentially better) options, but I’m happy with my choice. I also have room to upgrade and improve, so it’s nice to know that I’m not stuck.
1: BUY YOUR DOMAIN *optional
You can skip this step, but for about $10 I bought two years of couldabeenrad.com, which seems like a good deal to me. I used GoDaddy, found a coupon code online, and didn’t add any features they try to up sell to you. If the podcast falls apart, I’m out ten dollars and can cancel anytime. I’m not trying to promote GoDaddy, I just already had a few domains through them so it was very easy. You can use any host site that you want. Always check for coupons, though!
2: SIGN UP FOR SOUNDCLOUD
This may seem dumb, but I assumed that when you had a podcast, you just needed to upload it to iTunes somehow and there you go. Not true! Not true at all. You have to host your audio files somewhere, and then tell iTunes to look for the RSS feed (don’t worry, you don’t need to understand this part for this article to help you.) There are tons of options, and if money’s no option, you might as well go with one of the popular ones like libsyn.com and ignore this article. BUT, I chose to use SoundCloud and I’m very happy with that decision. It will even track your listener data for you for free!
Before posting the first episode, I created a free account and beefed up the profile with an image we created and some descriptions I made up. Customizing is optional, BUT this is what iTunes is going to be pulling in. It’s worth the time, and can be changed later. Without an image, your podcast will never stand out on iTunes. I’ll elaborate on how iTunes uses this information later.
3: POINT YOUR DOMAIN TO SOUNDCLOUD *optional
Skip this step if you decided not buy your own domain. But if you want www.yourpodcast.com to link to your SoundCloud page, that’s not a problem. Login to your GoDaddy account, click Domains in the menu on the home page, and select “Manage My Domains.” Click on the domain that you’ve bought, scroll down in the Settings tab and click “Manage” under Forwarding > Domain.
Set “Forward to” to your SoundCloud address, soundcloud.com/coulda-been-rad for example, set Redirect Type to Permanant and Forward Settings to “Forward With Masking”, which just means that when you type in couldabeenrad.com, the address bar will continue to say couldabeenrad.com while it displays soundcloud.com/coulda-been-rad. This will take a little while to take effect (usually 15 minutes in my experience), and if it doesn’t work after that you can try setting it to “Forward only”. This means the address bar will change from couldabeenrad.com to soundcloud.com/coulda-been-rad, but that’s not the end of the world. Getting a playable podcast is the most important part, for now. (I ran into some trouble during this step, but swapping between masking and no masking fixed my situation. Kind of a pain to have to wait 15 minutes each time to see if the change will work, but you can just watch cute animals falling asleep while you wait.)
4: POST YOUR FIRST PODCAST
Now that you have a SoundCloud account, go ahead and upload your first podcast. The free membership only allows you to upload a certain amount of data per month, but worry about that later. Our episodes are all basically an hour long, and so far we can fit two per month. You can upgrade when you hit a wall, and then it will be (as of writing this) $55 a year. That’s not too bad, but I don’t plan on paying it until I have to. If I can stay on the path I’ve started, I’ll manage the two a month cap without a problem for a while.
Be warned: There’s no guarantee the amount of time that will pass between this step and the next step (having it live on iTunes.) In the meantime, though, you can go ahead and start promoting your podcast by linking to your SoundCloud page. It works on mobile devices too, so while it’s not as convenient as iTunes, it’s still passable for a beginner period.
5: SUBMIT TO iTUNES
During this step, I recommend that you keep this page open the whole time. It’s simple, but understanding what information iTunes is pulling in will save you some time. There’s a great diagram on that page that makes it very clear.
The most important thing in this step is to find your SoundCloud RSS Feed URL. That sounds complicated, but if you just go to your SoundCloud profile and click the Edit button with the lil’ pencil icon, it can be found under the Content tab. It even says the exact words “RSS Feed” and has a link that starts with “http://feeds.soundcloud.com/…” You’ll want to copy that and click this iTunes link. That will open your iTunes application (if you don’t have it, you need to download it here) and load up a page on the iTunes store that looks like this:
Paste the RSS Feed URL into that box, click Continue, and just follow the directions. You will then have to wait for iTunes to approve your podcast, but that’s out of your hands. You’ve done your work. From here on, when you add new episodes to your SoundCloud, the RSS Feed will automatically update iTunes. And that’s pretty great. Congrats.
While the first reason that I went this route was the simplicity, the second reason is probably more important: Everything is upgradable. Use the free SoundCloud now, and pay when you need more. Great. Link your cheap domain to your SoundCloud for now, and later you can point it to a Tumblr or WordPress theme that automatically pulls in all of your SoundCloud posts in a more interesting way. This would allow you to also have a blog, to have more control over how your podcasts are presented, and to stand out a little bit.
But, in my opinion, you don’t need that at first. The most important thing is that you record a podcast. You just need a simple way for people to consume your content, and this has been the best option for me.
I hope this helps make the process of getting your first podcast live easier. It may seem daunting at first, but it’s really not that bad. It’s just hard to comb through the important information from seven different articles. Hopefully this limits the amount of tabs you have to click back and forth between.
And if you’re ever interested, check out our podcasts: couldabeenrad.com or oldtownnewworld.com/category/podcast/